The topic of water management has been elevated within and beyond the design community to levels never seen before. This awareness provides us all with a unique opportunity to make valuable and lasting change to the way we manage water. The visibility of this subject could not come at a better time. The looming variable impact of climate change on our water supplies, combined with the increasing pace of land development world wide, add to the importance of meeting this challenge immediately and directly. Low Impact Development (LID) design and successful implementation has come a long way in recent years. Although traditional water management is still standard practice, more and more municipalities are seeing the advantages of LID techniques and supporting its implementation. Recent work in this area has created the precedent necessary to elevate LID stormwater management to the level of standard practice. As LID has advanced it has become an essential part of engineer's toolkits - transforming how engineers approach and solve complex water resource management problems. This paper details how LID is being applied in a variety of ways to projects ranging from regional plans to neighborhood master plans to single sites. Using three projects as case studies, the interrelationship between LID and integrated water management is illustrated, and a successful approach is outlined.
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